Gobardhan Ash was born in 1907 in India. He studied at the Fine Arts Government School of Arts in Kolkata between 1926 and 1930 and the Government School of Arts and Crafts in Chennai in 1932. He was nominated Chief Artist at the Indian Institute of Arts and Industry in Kolkata in 1946, In 1953, he became a Senior Teacher at the Indian Art School of Kolkata, where he stayed another two years, before founding the Fine Art Mission of Begumpur in 1956. He then started his career as an independent artist and remained so until he died in 1996. In modern Indian art, his contribution is remarkable. India witnessed the advent of Western modernism is significant and colossal. His work was exploratory, visionary, and inspiring. He printed with bold courage and a free spirit, never yielding to the rules set by official art. He rejected the preconceived notions of how an artist ought to render his subjects and inevitably rebelled against the academic rules. In 1945, Ash was brought into the public eye when the Progressive Writers Association discovered his series of paintings on the Bengal famine. The paintings depict, if not document, the ravages of the 1943 catastrophe. In juxtaposition to the famine series, his impressionist and post-impressionist gouaches during the late 40s come as an interesting antithesis. Colors, vibrant, come alive in a pulsating tone to dominate the entire painting.